As revealed by a recent survey, only enterprises that implement an “all-in” approach to DevOps achieve the results of best-in-class enterprises seen in the “2017 State of DevOps Report.” Total DevOps approaches DevOps transformations holistically, integrating the full breadth of your DevOps value chain as well as the many stakeholders across your organization that must be engaged to ensure broad, enduring success.
Total DevOps transformation approach uses the following steps:
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- Identify the DevOps Leadership & Core Team. Your Leadership and Core Team members should be open to change, early adopters and innovator-types.
- Together as a team, set your true north and determine your big picture business goals for your DevOps journey.End-to-end pipeline lead time, release throughput, release quality, security, satisfaction and productivity are some examples of DevOps goal areas.
- Map the end-to-end (E2E) value streams specific to your chosen DevOps goals. Focusing on the goals your organization has for DevOps will ensure your team and organization are aligned and focused on outcomes.
- Identify bottlenecks for each value stream that will most affect each goal. During this step, gaps between current state and desired state are made clear.
- Dig deeper into the processes and further explore bottlenecks and gaps. Concentrate on deeply understanding how the relevant bottlenecks and gaps affect lead time to define specific improvement opportunities.
- Define solution strategies and tactics that align with goals and address improvement opportunities identified during analysis of current state. Total DevOps takes a comprehensive perspective of people, process and technology to define strategies and tactics.
- Develop an overall DevOps road map, which includes considerations for people readiness, process improvement and technology-specific implementation plans. Each of these implementation plans should incorporate change management or adoption enablement techniques.
- Determine how the existing technical debt will be addressed. Give highest priority to the backlog of technical debt that will most support the goals.
- Design metrics including key performance indicators (KPI) and service level agreements (SLA). The use of KPIs and SLAs will enable the ability to tune, track and validate the success of the solution.
- Implement! Agile iterations may include detailed design, proof of concept trials, implementation for one viable application environment and team and then deployment to all target application environments and teams using a well thought-out sequence and strategy for onboarding.
- Employ continuous feedback. Monitoring the performance of all application environments utilizing the established KPIs and SLAs will provide unbiased measurement of the system performance.
- Employ continuous improvement. Feedback is critical for learning and improvement which will fuel each step in your ongoing DevOps journey.
Summary
What do you think? Do you agree with the Total DevOps steps listed above are important to achieving big picture DevOps goals? Are there others you recommend? For more information, refer to a perspective paper, “Navigating Your Total DevOps Journey.”
While DevOps implemented using the Total DevOps approach provides a strong foundation for long-term enterprise business improvements, it is important to understand DevOps is not an island. Enterprises implementing DevOps should be aware that DevOps interoperates with other IT systems and practices. Enterprises are well-advised to choose tool-agnostic IT partners that can provide solutions that best suit the needs of each unique enterprise and can integrate and evolve DevOps together with all their IT systems.
